ead his
editorials, and pondered his books, full of solemn warnings of what will
happen to us if we do not mend our ways? We have been deeply impressed,
and in a great many respects we have mended our ways, and things have
begun to go better. But Jonah takes no heed of our repentance. He is
only thinking of those prophecies of his. Just in proportion as things
begin to look up morally, he gets low in his mind and begins to despair
of the Republic.

The trouble with Jonah is that he can see but one thing at a time, and
see that only in one way. He cannot be made to appreciate the fact that
"the world is full of a number of things," and that some of them are not
half bad. When he sees a dangerous tendency he thinks that it will
necessarily go on to its logical conclusion. He forgets that there is
such a thing as the logic of events, which is different from the logical
processes of a person who sits outside and prognosticates. There is one
tendency which all tendencies have in common, that is, to develop
counter tendencies.

There is, for example, a tendency on the part of the gypsy-moth
caterpillar to destroy utterly the forests of the United States. But
were I addressing a thoughtful company of these caterpillars I should
urge them to look upon their own future with modest self-distrust.
However well their programme looks upon paper, it cannot be carried out
without opposition. Long before the last tree has been vanquished, the
last of the gypsy moths may be fighting for its life against the enemies
it has made.

The Doctrinaire is very quick at generalizing. This is greatly to his
credit. One of the powers of the human mind on which we set great store
is that of entertaining general ideas. This is where we think we have
the advantage of the members of the brute creation. They have particular
experiences which at the time are very exciting to them, but they have
no abstract notions,--or, at least, no way of expressing them to us. We
argue that if they really had these ideas they would have invented
language long ago, and by this time would have had Unabridged
Dictionaries of their own. But we humans do not have to be content with
this hand-to-mouth way of thinking and feeling. When we see a hundred
things that strike us as being more or less alike, we squeeze them
together into one mental package, and give a single name to the whole
lot. This is a great convenience and enables us to do our thinking on a
large scale.